I want to start a charity like the phone number of “Samaritans” where people would be calling to our phone number (that I will buy on Skype.com) and switch using VoIP to conference call rooms of up to 20 people calling this number. Callers would be randomly allocated so you would be calling with strangers in a kind of chat roulette conference call fashion.
That’s interesting.
Are you asking a question here?
I’m not sure in what way what you describe would be like the Samaritans.
You might do well to get some advice from someone qualified in that area.
Disclaimer: I may well be that person
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Perhaps this isn’t clearly communicated but The Samaritans is a charity who provide mental health crisis support through drop-in centers, phone lines and text messaging.
The idea of creating rooms of people with these mental health crisis support seems very ill-conceived to me.
The Samaritans provide a very specific service of providing emotional support, this is effectively done through listening, and connecting people to other support services once they are more stable. This can range from A&E to council mental health referrals, or specialist support groups.
The point is that this is a job people are trained to do, and the Samaritans staff have to be monitored for their own mental health. Linking untrained people in crisis with others, either random members of the public or others in crisis would be from my untrained perspective a very bad idea.
Specifically the Samaritans unlike a friend or family member don’t give advice or talk about their experiences but, predominantly listen without judging, ask questions and potentially suggest places for specific support. Friends/family will tend to suggest ways to cope etc which is the role of a mental health professional who can get to know your case.
People call the Samaritans for a range of reasons, but they are almost always when people have no other place to turn and the most extreme situations would be when someone is planning to or has attempted to take their life.
In these cases it’s extremely important the other person knows what to do to help someone to avoid them killing themselves, and potentially arrange or encourage them to call for medical help to avert their death.
Given that social networks have seen groups of people egg on people to the point of committing suicide, I think it would be extremely unwise to connect someone who is potentially in crisis to complete strangers who could be themselves in crisis, ill-equipped to help or worse encourage the person to take action.
From a technical standpoint it would need to use either Twillio or Nexmo which have APIs for this kind of service, unlike Skype, coupled with custom software and a server.
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Everything that was said about Samaritans is true and your reasoning is perfect.
In the meantime I disagree that people with mental problems should not talk to each other as a crowd. I think that does more harm than good because people need to communicate and connect with other people alike.
On the other hand I plan to do this for everyone, not just for people with mental health problems.
You would call a phone number (I think is chap to buy one that is easy to remember) and people from all over the world could call this number and enter a conference call room of up to 20 people or so. As slots become available in the virtual rooms when people hung up, new people coming in are given one of these slots in a quite random fashion.
I would really like to talk about this stuff in more detail to make it clear what I want to build.
Thank you for telling me about Twillio or Nexmo. I am sure I will put this VoIP project up, one day!
I don’t know why we’re assuming that this person needs any advice on the non technical aspects and hasn’t already thoroughly researched this.
I think it’s s red herring and we should get back to trying to reply to the question which was asking for technical help.
Not sure what’s going on here but think some confusing moderation has been done.
There has been no moderation to this thread.
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For clarity, there was a flag for cross posting, no edits were made.
It was for duplicate posting and that wasn’t this thread.